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Management by surveillance

Fri 1 Jun 201819:27

The cliché of a large, soulless company — a crowded commute to an office of
cubicles as far as the eye can see, micromanagement and HR processes with no
basis in logic — is a cliche for a reason. And while some of it could be
considered annoying but harmless, and none of it new, it’s also pretty clear
that a lot of “modern” corporate practices are firmly rooted in a culture of
surveillance, control and mistrust.

I’ve been lucky enough to work in quite a mix of environments, and in each place
I’ve put up with policies I didn’t like, because they were balanced out by the
good things and that’s life. Almost none of them have been deal-breakers. But
it’s always been at least a little bit frustrating, not least because no one
responsible for them ever wants to talk about them.

Some of the policies I criticise here might seem… very normal. Reasonable,
even. My criticism of them might seem a bit entitled. Well, good. Even the most
common practises should be questioned and critiqued, perhaps especially the most
common ones, and I dare say it’s a lot less entitled to question a practise
than impose it without justification.

Medical certificates

Every place I’ve worked for has had some policy around taking sick leave, and it
usually goes: if you take more than eg. two consecutive days of sick leave, you
need a medical certificate from a doctor for any more.

So your worker says they have a cold and you don’t believe them. Firstly, holy
macaroni you’re a tool. Secondly, how exactly do you think a medical certificate
is going to thwart this evil plan of your employee’s? Do you expect the doctor
to do a swab for cold bacteria, send it off to the lab, pace around their office
until the results come in, circle the incriminating results and yell
AAAAAAAAAHA! before loudly and publicly tearing up the unsigned
certificate in the face of your conniving employee?

Here’s how a medical diagnosis really works:

Patient describes symptoms.

Doctor agrees those are symptoms of a cold.

DOCTOR PRESCRIBES GOING HOME TO REST.

I could not tell you the number of times I have dragged myself to the doctor
because of this idiocy — worsening my own condition, prolonging my absence from
work, spreading disease around for no reason whatsoever. I have yet to hear
a single practising doctor actually endorse this idea, or indeed express
anything but hatred for a policy that is a total waste of their time and
attention and is constantly making them sick too.

An employer insisting on this is effectively refusing to trust their employee,
but accepting the word of a doctor who is, themselves, trusting their employee.
Which means it has nothing to do with trust, it’s just about petty control. A
way to remind the employee that even at home, even when taking time to care for
themselves and their colleagues, they are under your watch and your rule and
must do meaningless busy work at your discretion. Which is a bit sick, really.

Social media

Over the last twenty years private companies and government departments alike
have come to realise that their employees (a) can speak their mind on the
internet and (b) tend to be lax enough with their privacy to be linked to their
employer. (Or (c) stopped giving a hoot about that years ago.) Obviously
this sort of nonsense is intolerable to the modern employer and so policies
abound telling staff not to be critical of them on social media. Or in private
communication. Or when whispering into the deepest well in the middle of a
forest.

In the case of government departments (in Australia, at least) this has been
quite broadly interpreted to mean that any criticism of the entire government
or its policies is a sackable offence. And while
some brave folk are pushing back,
it’s a pretty lopsided (and
neverending)
fight.

Having a policy dictating what a worker can post on the internet is as absurd as
having a policy dictating what they can eat for dinner. Are they purporting to
post on behalf of the organisation? Do their posts indicate a threat to business
operations or the safety of their colleagues? Are they abusing access to private
or privileged information? If not, there’s simply no case for a policy to even
cover this, let alone be enforced.

Oh oh oh, but what if it’s [extremely amateur lawyer voice]ON WORK TIME?
Still doesn’t matter, Barrister Bonehead. People can tweet from the damn toilet
and you can’t stop them. If you’re okay with them getting up to go for a two
minute walk (probably to shake off the open-plan-induced mental fatigue), what
do you care if they fire off a post in that time?

Like the medical certificate BS, this is another policy that is premised upon
employers having the right to stare into your personal life, your presence on
social media as yourself, your opinions in your very head and exert control.

Open plan

(I am including cubicles in this, because they are the same goddamned thing.)

I don’t really care which tradition came first, open plan or closed offices. It
doesn’t matter. I do know, from talking to folk many years my senior, that
surveillance as a reason for open workspaces was a lot more blatant in times
past, with your manager patrolling between rows of desks like a schoolteacher.
That employers now try to get staff on board with claims of encouraging
collaboration or unity shows a hint of self awareness, that they know they
should be ashamed of their zeal to recreate this environment.

Exactly what kind of “collaboration” do you actually think open plan actually
fosters? What does being in immediate physical proximity to other people allow
you to do that eg. IRC, email or video conferencing does not?

This isn’t a rhetorical question, it has an answer: it allows you to walk up to
someone who’s concentrating, stand in their personal space and unilaterally
demand their attention. This is a stupid thing to encourage people to do to
other people you hired to concentrate on things. It encourages interactions that
are totally determined by one party and a total surprise to the other. It is the
opposite of collaboration.

Why bother having a hiring process that supposedly selects for a particular set
of skills when you’re just going to obliterate those skills with hostile
architecture and interactions? How well does anyone work with someone constantly
looking over their shoulder? Or talking loudly nearby? Or standing in their
peripheral vision? Pretty damn poorly: Tom Morris combs through some references
showing the profoundly debilitating effects of open plan, and
Alina Manda tweeted a few more
for my collection.

Here’s what’s really going on, oh manager: you simply can’t stand the idea that
your workers might become so engrossed in their work that they forget, for a
brief moment, that they’re being told what to do by someone else. You can’t
trust an employee whose monitor you can’t see. You see an office as a status
symbol, not an amenity, and therefore as something to deny anyone below you on
the org chart. Get over it and let your workers work.

Enforced co-location at all, really

It’s easy to think that attending an office every day is just the normal,
default thing for workers to do, even workers who do little else than talk to
each other and use a networked computer. Why mess with that?

Imagine the changes we could see in our cities if our public transport didn’t
have to cope with massive congestion during the same two hour periods every day.
If people didn’t have to do something as dangerous as driving for hours a week.
We have designed and built our entire urban infrastructure around what might
have been a necessity before the advent of digitised storage and computer
networking, but is now almost entirely a corporate whim. Talk about private
gains with socialised losses!

If you are a manager who wants collaboration, let your damn team decide how
they’re going to communicate, on their own terms, under their own constraints,
with each other. Because that’s the definition of collaboration. It might
involve working together in the same space all the time, because offices can be
nice, but it might not, because getting there might not be. It might involve IRC
and Google Hangouts. It might involve mostly email but two days a week of
syncing up at the office. AND it might mean that your company now actually
has a place for people who need to do the school run every day, or don’t live in
the expensive suburbs near the office, or who have a hearing impairment. It
might also mean that it’s just a better environment all round for everyone.

If you don’t want them to do that, stop saying you want collaboration. You
don’t. You don’t want that at all. You just want to be able to have a watchful
eye over your reports. Even if they have to risk car accidents, or go days
without seeing their children. Stop even using the word “collaboration”. You’re
banned.

What’s the big deal though? So big companies are dire to work for and
micromanagement sucks, news at eleven.

It’s this idea that you are totally under your employer’s control while you’re
on the clock (or, for that matter, off it) that I just find repugnant. It’s
dangerous, and it’s toxic, and it needs to stop.

I accept there’s debate around the social contract of work, but to me, the deal
is this: your employer hires you to work for a stated reason. There’s a job, or
a goal, or some stated set of skills they want you to apply. The instructions
they give you, the constraints they apply, it should all fall within that remit.
Otherwise we’re just accepting this idea that a contract of employment is about
control, not the negotiated exchange of labour for money.

Surveillance is a way to exert that control, but in a deniable way. It’s about
making people anxious enough to moderate their own behaviour, allowing those
watching to deny they’re even manipulating people.

Acceptance of this culture opens the door to bullying, sexual harassment and
every other form of abuse. No matter what the laws of the land are, when so many
people accept that employees surrender their autonomy to their employers, this
affects the psychology of people in both positions. The legal contract is
utterly ineffective at governing this kind of power while the social contract
drives every action.

It’s something that manipulative and violent people can easily exploit. It’s an
environment in which marginalised groups are even more vulnerable as workers —
because if society still has some undercurrent of you being treated as property
and not a person, this is compounded by the attitude that employers also kind
of own you while they’re paying you.

Am I being unduly harsh about where this comes from? Is it just the way managers
manager, because that’s just… normal? But how long can a corporate culture
persist before “it’s normal” ceases to be an excuse? Management is considered a
profession in its own right, with things you can learn and research that can
guide your decisions. Ignoring evidence or reason so you can keep doing things
in a way that just so happens to be how someone obsessed with controlling
other people would do it, makes you either a bad manager or… someone obsessed
with controlling people. Take your pick.

The fact that the vast majority of employers would rather take substantial hits
to productivity than give up otherwise pointless customs of control makes a
complete and total lie of any claim, individually or politically, that most just
want to get the best out of their workers. For so many of them, their decisions
are hugely driven by controlling employees — right up there with their bottom
line, their reputation, their contribution to society, they must make their
workers know, at any cost… well, who’s boss. It needs to stop, or it needs to
be a big part of every debate around industrial relations and business policy,
and especially every blatant attempt at rentseeking, until it ends.